Disease, Culture and History

Abstract

It is an unremarkable truism that not so long ago most historians of medicine were white male doctors documenting the progress of medical ideas and practices. But now medical historians in Australia, the United States and Britain, if not elsewhere are more likely to have learned a wry scepticism in Ph.D. programs and to write a critical social or a cultural history of disease or health care. During the past twenty years or so the discipline expanded and became more diverse and, as it did so, the verbal qualifiers proliferated around our subject. What is it now that we do? Is it intellectual or social or cultural history of medicine, of biomedical science, of health, of illness, of suffering or of disease? And if this dispersal of interests had not already rendered our disciplinary identity sufficiently complex, it now seems that each element of this modern periodic table has an unstable valence. What is 'disease'? What counts as 'medicine? What is 'culture'? Even the